The Guy Who Could Beat Hillary (Isn’t Running for President)

After 18 months of quiet sleuthing, Republican congressman Trey Gowdy’s Benghazi committee—which uncovered Hillary Clinton’s sketchy e-mails and made Gowdy a right-wing star—has exploded into a partisan carnival. Now, as Clinton and Gowdy prepare to battle on Thursday, the man who once threatened to end her White House bid suddenly has plenty on the line himself

For all the recent evidence that careers can unspiral pretty quickly in Washington—see the soon-to-retire House Speaker John Boehner or his would-be replacement, Kevin McCarthy—you might consider as the converse the bright and rising star that is Trey Gowdy.

It wasn’t so long ago that the third-term Republican congressman from South Carolina was a virtual nonentity on Capitol Hill, a point he concedes himself. “I would not be on the list of what I believe to be the top 20 most effective members of Congress,” Gowdy told me. To the extent he was known at all, it was for his golf handicap (a 1.7, he says, the lowest in the House) and for his bewildering haircut—an ever-changing coiffure that has rotated between a faux-hawk, a slick-back, and a modiﬁed mullet. And yet, in the last several weeks, Gowdy has been pestered—at times outright begged—by his congressional Republican colleagues to take McCarthy’s place as Majority Leader and Boehner’s as Speaker of the House.

And on Thursday, the very thing that has made Gowdy one of the most important Republicans in Congress will make him the most important Republican in America. That’s because the hopes and fever dreams of a vast multitude of conservatives will be vested in him that day, when, as chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, he’ll publicly grill Hillary Clinton about her private e-mail server. It’s a long-awaited showdown that’s now suddenly billed as a political Super Bowl, a potentially golden opportunity for both Clinton’s detractors and her defenders.

The genesis of Thursday’s spectacle—as well as Gowdy’s newfound notoriety and the whole Benghazi committee—can be traced to a morning last May in the congressman’s backyard. While Gowdy mowed the lawn behind his Spartanburg, South Carolina, home, his phone began to ring, with Boehner on the other end.

Nearly two years had passed since the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, but Boehner and House Republicans still sniffed opportunity in the conspiracy theories swirling around then Secretary of State Clinton’s response to the assault. Four Americans had died, and conservatives ﬁgured that Clinton had been guilty of, at best, negligence or, at worst, a despicable cover-up. With a presidential campaign on the horizon, they glimpsed a perfect time to create a special committee to dig around on Benghazi and, by extension, Clinton.

And this is where Gowdy came in: Before he was a ho-hum congressman, he was a spectacular lawyer, a crusading prosecutor with a specialty in long-unsolved murder cases. He’d be the perfect guy to clear up a Libyan cold case—and maybe lend a partisan crusade the sheen of professionalism and objectivity, too.

Gowdy ﬁnished up the backyard and noticed his missed call. When he rang his boss back, he heard the Speaker’s familiar nicotine baritone: “Thinking about doing this committee thing. Don’t say anything. I’ll call you back later this afternoon.”

The news raised a pressing question for Gowdy—a practical concern that wouldn’t likely occur to anyone in his position. He wanted to know if he had time to ﬁnish mowing his lawn. “How soon will you call back?” he asked the Speaker. “I’ve still got to cut the front yard.”

“Go cut the yard, son,” Boehner replied.

Gowdy, who is 51, was told later that afternoon that he’d be chairing the House Select Committee on Benghazi. And in the past 18 months he’s quietly overseen interviews with nearly four dozen witnesses in private sessions (the most recent last Friday, with longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin), for a highly anticipated report the committee hopes to release early next year.

Of course, for all the closed-door testimony, the committee’s most important discovery is already notoriously public and plenty damaging to the Clinton campaign. Gowdy’s investigators unearthed eight e-mail messages that contained a private address used by Clinton. This led in March to the realization that she had been using a private server installed in her home. The mystery of why she used the secret server—and the myriad GOP fantasies about what she kept hidden with it—has obviously become a central story line in the early drama of the Clinton campaign.

And it’s changed the course of Gowdy’s career. If the congressman has become an avenging angel and a rising star to his fellow Republicans, to Democrats Gowdy’s now considered a villainous hatchet man. “Boehner made a decision to launch a partisan investigation, and Gowdy’s carrying that out,” says David Brock, the author and former right-wing attack dog who has become a staunch Clinton defender.

That’s an argument that gained credibility in recent weeks as the Benghazi committee, after 18 months of seemingly careful work, has suddenly become a circus. In September, McCarthy, the House Majority Leader and then Speaker-in-waiting, bragged to Fox News that the committee had damaged Hillary in the polls—an amazing contention that belied Gowdy’s and Boehner’s endless assertions that there was nothing partisan about the committee. Not only did McCarthy’s comments appear to cost him the speakership, they gave ammo to Clinton, whose campaign featured the impromptu confession in a commercial. If that wasn’t bad enough for Gowdy’s committee, a recently fired investigator named Bradley Podliska then gave interviews to CNN and The New York Times that further painted the operation as a booze-fueled, Clinton-obsessed witch hunt.

All of which makes Thursday’s hearing as critical now for Gowdy as it is for Clinton. Can the clever lawyer somehow restore the committee’s patina of professionalism and undo the impression that it’s a partisan Clinton smear project? Gowdy feels he’s ready to meet his moment. “I was a mediocre lawyer for a long time,” he told me one recent morning in South Carolina, “so what I lack in talent I make up for in experience.” All politicians traffic in false modesty, but Gowdy, who speaks in a laid-back southern frat-boy twang, is so good at it, he actually seems humble. Of course, it’s not humility as much as cunning he ﬂashes when he points out that he’s not trying to derail Clinton. “I do not view it as my job to ‘Stop Secretary Clinton,’ ” he says.

“I would not take the briefing from the FBI if it came with
Victoria’s Secret models,” Gowdy says. “Because if there was a leak,
I don’t want anybody to say it’s me.”

Never mind that at two o’clock that morning he was wide awake reﬁning the six-page list of questions he planned to put to her. No, Gowdy insists that he doesn’t have it in for Hillary. “I literally did not mention her name the ﬁrst three hearings we had,” he told me, explaining that upending Clinton’s campaign isn’t the chore he signed up for. That is “the job of ﬁll-in-the-blank: Reince Priebus or whoever the [presidential] nominee is. That’s not my job.”

Statements like that are exactly what had been making Gowdy so effective as a potential Clinton slayer. After all, the more his committee can appear to be free of partisan intent, the better the chances the GOP has of achieving a partisan outcome. In other words, more than any other conservative who has taken on the duty of stopping the Clintons over the years, Gowdy has—despite the blunders of his allies—gotten the closest to succeeding at it.

If Hillary Clinton doesn’t end up in the Oval Office, it will be because somebody else—Jeb? Joe? Trump?!—wins at the polls. But make no mistake: That victory will be owed in large part to Gowdy, who has already thrown her off course.

By this point on the calendar, after all, she had planned to be well on her way to securing the Democratic nomination—not preparing to troop up to Capitol Hill, yet again, to answer questions, yet again, about yet another Clinton scandal.

But when you put it that way, the most surprising aspect of the whole e-mail episode isn’t that Clinton’s soft glide to the White House has now been interrupted, but rather that we ever bought into the delusion that a coronation would be simple for her. For 25 years now, the Republicans have used every opportunity to attack, investigate, and otherwise foil the march of the Clintons. And for those same 25 years, Bill and Hillary have invariably aided these efforts by supplying grist for the GOP scandal mill.

In the case of the e-mail scandal, Clinton haters found something that perfectly conforms to the long-running narrative of deviousness they’ve pushed: that the Clintons are secretive, calculating, and forever breaking the rules. Hillary’s own ham-ﬁsted attempts to explain matters—she’s tried being defensive, she’s tried laughing it all off, she’s even tried a kind of grudging apology—haven’t helped. But then, history tells us that Clinton responses rarely help contain the whiff of scandal.

The saving grace for them has always been that despite the Clintons’ own screwups, their Republican inquisitors have inevitably comported themselves worse. Time and again, it’s looked as if the Clintons have been backed into a corner, only to slip away when their foes overreached. For months, it appeared as if Republicans would avoid repeating that mistake this time around. In Gowdy, they had their shrewdest inquisitor yet.

For one thing, he’s tended to steer clear of the spotlight—proving to be the rare congressman who doesn’t jump at the chance to wield a gavel on TV by holding public hearings. Most of the select committee’s work has been conducted in private. Clinton’s testimony will be only its fourth public hearing. The previous three were total snoozes. “My goal,” Gowdy told me, “is not to be exciting.”

To bone up for October’s showdown, Gowdy has been watching videos of
Clinton’s appearances before Congress, scouting her strengths and
weaknesses.

Gowdy’s also shown restraint, and a bit of humanity, where others might not have. When he discovered that a key potential witness, a former CIA officer named Tyler Drumheller, who was sending private intelligence about Libya to Clinton through their mutual friend Sidney Blumenthal, had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, he did not call Drumheller in for questioning. “It’s just really hard for me to say, ‘I want you to take one of the last days you have and do this,’ ” Gowdy explained to me. Drumheller’s “time was probably better spent around people that he loved and that loved him.”

Most of all—and most vexing to Clinton—Gowdy has managed to avoid the mission creep that has hobbled so many of the past efforts to bring her and her husband down. Although Democrats have seized on the former staffer Podliska’s accusations that the committee zeroed in on Clinton rather than other avenues of investigation, even that focus on Clinton has been relatively restrained. Gowdy’s refrained from indulging in conspiracy theories about Hillary and Benghazi—like that Clinton issued a “stand down” order that prevented a military response, or that the Libyan consulate was being used for illegal arms shipments—and he hasn’t been nearly as aggressive as others might have been about the e-mail system the committee helped to uncover. Gowdy says he’s only after correspondence related to Benghazi and has no interest in whether, for instance, Clinton’s other e-mails contained classiﬁed information. “If you may ﬁnd facts that are interesting and relevant that are outside the jurisdiction, you’ve got two options: You can go back and enlarge it to include that, or you can say, ‘Well, that’s for somebody else to determine,’ ” Gowdy says. “My jurisdiction has not been enlarged, and I don’t want it enlarged.”

The clever result has been that certain matters beyond Gowdy’s carefully policed purview have fallen into the laps of investigators who are less easily dismissed as partisan witch-hunters. For instance, the intelligence agencies’ inspector general, not Gowdy, investigated whether Clinton improperly sent and received classiﬁed e-mail; and it’s the FBI, not Gowdy, that is reportedly investigating the security of Clinton’s private e-mail server. I say “reportedly” because even Gowdy claims not to know what, exactly, the FBI is looking into. And he says the less he knows, the better. “I would not take the brieﬁng from the FBI if it came with Victoria’s Secret models,” Gowdy told me. “I don’t want to know, because if there was a leak, I don’t want anybody to say it’s me.”

Yet despite his professed aversion to seeing information trickle out inappropriately, plenty of it has. That’s why Gowdy’s Democratic critics—and some journalists, too—believe that the committee has leaked like a sieve, pointing to a series of media reports that they say could only have come from Gowdy or the six other Republicans on the 12-member committee. Like the New York Times story back in March that ﬁrst broke the news about Clinton’s private e-mail address. Or the more recent story revealing that the former Clinton staffer who set up the e-mail system had told the committee he’d plead the Fifth.

Democrats say Gowdy has no interest in an impartial investigation—they note that despite all the leaks, testimony that makes Clinton look good never seems to get released. “I think Trey says a lot of the right things and certainly doesn’t engage in the kind of hyperbole of some of the others that have gone before him,” Adam Schiff, a California congressman and a Democratic member of the Benghazi committee, told me. “But he is acting in an equally partisan way. Tragically, it’s become a committee with very little focus on Benghazi and instead is obsessed with attempting to derail Secretary Clinton’s campaign.”

When he ponders these complaints, Gowdy affects a sorrowful, almost wounded tone—though he steadfastly refuses to return ﬁre at the Democrats, lest he undermine his claims of bipartisanship. Of course, he denies the charges of leaking. Though Gowdy doesn’t sound too chagrined that reporters have gotten their hands on certain information—or that the media have rather helpfully ampliﬁed some anti-Clinton claims that would seem partisan if he’d shared them. “Nothing advances things like a media story does,” Gowdy told me. “A Republican congressman from South Carolina saying X really doesn’t garner that much attention.”

On the desk in Gowdy’s office on Capitol Hill, he keeps pictures of the four Americans killed in the Benghazi attacks, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens. Just as when he was a prosecutor, he wants to do right by the dead and their families. “I never expected to be doing homicide cases in Congress,” he says. “Maybe because I did do homicide cases and I am so well acquainted with the ﬁnality of death, having met with the family members of the four, that is enough for me. And when I meet with them again, I can say, ‘This is what I found out that you didn’t know previously.’ That is all the success I need.”

And the families seem to appreciate it. “Get answers, please!” Patricia Smith, whose 34-year-old son was killed in the attack, has publicly beseeched Gowdy—which has made it that much tougher for Clinton’s defenders to portray the South Carolina congressman as some sort of Inspector Javert.

To bone up for his showdown with Clinton, the old prosecutor has lately been watching videos of her past appearances before Congress, scouting her strengths and weaknesses. This time around, her vaunted skill at running out the ﬁve minutes allotted to a congressman’s question will be useless; Clinton has promised to testify for as long as it takes to answer all of the committee’s questions.

For her part, Clinton’s team is dispensing with the usual game of lowering expectations. The gift of McCarthy’s comments has made Thursday the last best chance to put the e-mail mess to rest—and Clinton campaign officials have been privately boasting about the “war room” from which they’ll direct spin during and after the hearings. Some supporters even predict that Hillary, riding high after a composed and impressive debate performance last week, will use the hearings to her advantage. “I expect she’ll run circles around them,” Brock says of Hillary’s Republican tormentors. But even if Clinton succeeds in quieting the e-mail questions, the episode has inﬂicted damage that won’t be undone. That’s because Gowdy and his investigation have already changed the terms on which Clinton’s presidential campaign will be run.

Gone forever are those heady days, just after Clinton jumped in the race, when she pledged to run as an optimistic trailblazer. Thanks to Gowdy—and a summer spent bogged down in talk of testimony and leaks and secret servers—we know voters won’t get that kind of campaign. Not out of the Republicans and not out of Clinton. If Hillary Clinton wants to win the White House, she’ll now have to win ugly, in that grinding, divisive, and soul-crushing way that the Clintons have always won.

And in that sense, Gowdy has won, too. Although he swears up and down he has no ambition for higher office—he rebuffed the recent entreaties that he run for Majority Leader and Speaker—he can’t help but notice his newfound notoriety. Thanks to his reputation as a potential Hillary warrior, he’s already a popular draw on the GOP fund-raising circuit—traveling all over the country to rake in the bucks for his fellow Republicans.

He even gets stopped on the street. Gowdy recalls a recent encounter at the Charlotte airport as he and a fellow South Carolina Republican congressman, Mick Mulvaney, were making their way home. “This guy comes up and says, ‘I’m a big fan,’ ” Gowdy tells me. “I say, ‘Well, thank you. Let me introduce you to your congressman. This is Mick Mulvaney.’ He goes, ‘I don’t care anything about Mick Mulvaney.’ I say, ‘Well, here he is, right here with me.’ And he says, ‘Well, hey, Mick, will you take a picture of me and Congressman Gowdy?’ ”

As he recounted the tale, Gowdy beamed. Getting recognized as the guy who could vanquish a Clinton sure beats being known as the guy with the haircut.